


First Responses

by glimmerglanger



Category: Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: (But only Obi-Wan and it's not very relevant), Accident Related Meet Cute?, Accidents, Alternate Universe - Firefighters, Car Accidents, Emergency room, M/M, Modern AU, Serious Injuries, Whumptober 2020, flirting at inappropriate times
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-25
Updated: 2020-10-25
Packaged: 2021-03-09 06:34:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,132
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27189406
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/glimmerglanger/pseuds/glimmerglanger
Summary: Obi-Wan saw accidents most every day. He’d grown used to assessing collisions with a clear head, taking them apart like a puzzle. Twisted metal and spilled fuel were only distractions, there to get in the way of his job, which was, at the end of the day, doing his best to make sure everyone involved walked away alive and as well as possible.He knew the best way to open a crushed door on an old pick-up. In fact, he considered, panting up at the ceiling, trying to think around the crowding, noisy pain in his head, he wouldn’t try to take the door in this situation.OR, the one where Obi-Wan gets in a truck accident, and Cody shows up to help.
Relationships: CC-2224 | Cody/Obi-Wan Kenobi
Comments: 126
Kudos: 765





	1. Accident

**Author's Note:**

> Written for two days of Whumptober (accidents and emergency room). Warnings for injuries caused by a car accident. Turned into...a bit of a meet cute? No one is every going to believe they actually met like this.

Obi-Wan saw accidents most every day. He’d grown used to assessing collisions with a clear head, taking them apart like a puzzle. Twisted metal and spilled fuel were only distractions, there to get in the way of his job, which was, at the end of the day, doing his best to make sure everyone involved walked away alive and as well as possible.

He knew the best way to open a crushed door on an old pick-up. In fact, he considered, panting up at the ceiling, trying to think around the crowding, noisy pain in his head, he wouldn’t try to take the door in this situation.

Someone - he didn’t know who, hadn’t gotten more than a passing glance at the vehicle - had T-boned his truck. They must have been driving a tank, he thought, with a weak laugh, because they’d driven away just fine afterwards, leaving him half-off the road, crushed against a tree, dark smoke rising out from the hood through the frozen air, his truck alarm blaring on and off for no reason he could discern.

He needed to focus. He knew that. Needed to stay conscious. Think his was through the situation. 

So...so, no, he wouldn’t have tried to open the door, not if he’d been sent out to the scene of the accident from the station, not if it were someone else sitting in the driver’s seat. Metal was pressed all against him, crushed around him. Crushed into him, he considered, twitching the fingers on his left hand and stopping as a wave of cold heat rocketed up his arm.

The front of his vehicle had been striven in by the tree he’d hit, on his way off the road. There was pressure, against his lower gut, the hard, rounded edge of the steering wheel, he thought. Internal injuries would, he considered, explain the problems he was having breathing deeply. Focusing.

That was right. He needed to focus. Someone had hit him, slammed into the driver’s side door, pushed him off the road and into this tree, left the truck smoking. He smelled something burning. They’d driven away. He’d watched the red of their brake lights disappear, tried to focus on the license plate and caught, perhaps, a pair of sixes….

And now he was pinned into place, metal holding him in a cold embrace. Opening the door, pulling the metal away all at once, could end up causing major hemorrhaging. So, if he’d been the first responder, instead of the person trapped in their truck, he would not have pulled the door right away.

His head swam. He could taste salt and copper in the back of his throat.

It was dark, he considered, staring through the cracked windshield. And he’d been on the way home, after a terribly long shift. The night was in that twisty period where it might have been better called morning, the wrong side of three A.M.

He considered the likelihood of anyone else driving down the road before the blood loss got him and didn’t like the answer he got. His cell was on the other seat, in his coat. There but unreachable.

Obi-Wan swallowed, half-laughed, and shut his eyes, just for a moment.

When he opened them again, his ears were ringing. The truck alarm had stopped, which was a relief. He was shivering, all over.

He stared forward, wondering, absently, what had woken him up. It must have been the light, he considered, groggy. For a long beat, he assumed the sun had come up, surprised he’d lived that long. It took him a long, confused moment to realize that it wasn’t the sun’s rays streaming in through his windshield, distorted by all the smoke.

The angle was all wrong. And the light was too white-blue and focused.

Headlights, his brain supplied, after he considered and discarded a half-dozen other options. Another vehicle. For a moment, he thought it was going to hit him, too, and he braced, but the lights weren’t moving.

They just stayed where they were, and he stared forward into them, thoughts getting more sluggish by the moment, until someone swore, loudly, close by and said, “Holy shit, there’s someone in here.”

Obi-Wan rolled his head to the side. The noise had come through his broken window. He blinked, his night-vision gone from staring into the light, and said, “Yes, hello.”

“Fuck,” his as-yet-unseen visitor said, eloquently. He had a nice voice, though, this strange man who had found Obi-Wan on the side of the road. Soothing. “Hey, are you alright?”

“Not really,” Obi-Wan said, feeling a crooked smile stretch across his mouth, his focus drifting away again. “How are you?” His eyes were very heavy, too heavy to keep open. He shut them, just for a moment.

He snapped them open again to his guest snapping, “Hey, hey, I need you to stay with me, alright? Keep your eyes open, alright?”

The voice was coming from a different place. Obi-Wan’s head wasn’t working right, and he recognized that, from somewhere far away. He rolled his head to the other side. There was a man in the passenger seat. Obi-Wan was almost certain he hadn’t been there before.

He was...unfamiliar. Obi-Wan had never seen him before. He had close-cropped dark hair. A set, unhappy look to his mouth. A scar down one side of his face. “Dashing,” Obi-Wan slurred, vaguely worried that he seemed to have stopped shivering at some point.

“What?” the man asked. He wasn’t sitting properly. He had one knee on the seat and was leaning over the center console towards Obi-Wan. He was, Obi-Wan realized, after a bleary moment, doing something down by Obi-Wan’s hips. Obi-Wan looked down, head dropping heavily, and watched him slice through the seat belt with a knife.

“I said you look very dashing,” Obi-Wan gasped out, the consideration that, perhaps, this man was trying to help him slowly rising in his head. He licked his lips and asked, “Do you think you could call 911?”

“Rex is on the phone with them now,” the man said. Obi-Wan wondered who Rex was. 

“Oh, good,” he said, instead of asking. He couldn’t seem to lift his head again, which was a shame. The angle hurt his neck, terribly. He blinked, trying to focus, and managed to rasp out, “Thank you.”

The man laughed, sudden and sharp, startled, and Obi-Wan wondered what was funny but...he was too tired to ask, so tired, and--

“Hey!” the man said, loud and sharp, close. “I need you to stay awake,” he said, and, oh, he’d put a hand on Obi-Wan’s cheek, pushing his head back up so it wasn’t just hanging. He had warm skin. Calluses on his palm and fingers. “Can you do that for me?”

“Probably not, I’m afraid,” Obi-Wan told him, too tired to try to lie. The man swore, and...oh, he wasn’t in the passenger seat anymore. Obi-Wan wasn’t sure how he’d gotten around the truck, but he was reaching in through the driver’s side window. Obi-Wan blinked up at him, he seemed blurry, and asked, “What’s your name?”

The man frowned, briefly, and turned to snap some words that were just white-noise in Obi-Wan’s head. Maybe he was talking to someone else. Whoever was calling 911. That would be nice. He shut his eyes.

“--Cody,” the man said, hand cupped warm against Obi-Wan’s jaw. “Hey, did you hear me?”

“Cody,” Obi-Wan slurred, because that was a name, wasn’t it? He’d wanted to know the man’s name, hadn’t he? “The handsome man. From my truck.”

“Yeah, that’s right,” the man said, he flashed a smile that looked reassuring, turned and spoke to someone else for a beat. Obi-Wan leaned against his hand. He couldn’t support the weight of his own head. It felt like it weighed roughly a ton. “Hey, hey, no, none of that, stay awake. Hey, we can’t keep him like this, he’s not going to last.”

“Fuck,” another man said, voice very similiar, so similar that for a moment Obi-Wan thought it was still Cody. “Well they’re not going to--”

“--going to hurt,” someone said. Cody. Obi-Wan blinked, made a questioning sound, and tried to scream. He didn’t think he succeeded. There was white-hot pain, lurching through his body, turning the world inside out for a moment, so that nothing else existed outside of his bones and gut, all set on fire and frozen to ice and--

“--give my hand a squeeze, can you do that for me?” There were spots of white, overhead, Obi-Wan stared up at them, drifting. The pain had gone away, somewhere else. Everything had gone somewhere else. 

Something leaned over, blocking out the spots of light. A face. Handsome. Cody. “Hey, hey, there you go, that’s good,” he said, “you just stay with us, alright? Squeeze my hand, can you do that?”

Obi-Wan took a moment to remember where his hand was. Oh, it was warm. That helped locate it. He closed his fingers, as best he could, and heard Cody make a relieved sound. Thinking about his hand brought back awareness of the rest of his body, of something soft under his back.

He was, he realized, after a long minute, laying down. He squeezed Cody’s hand again and slurred, “What?”

“We’re taking you to the ER,” Cody said, and Obi-Wan blinked at him, because that didn’t make any sense. They were supposed to wait for the ambulance. But he was vaguely aware of the thrum of an engine. He tried to focus past Cody’s face. There were… seats, he supposed. Another man, sitting in one of them.

“Why?” he asked, trying to take stock of the rest of his body. They’d...wedged him in to the backseat of a vehicle, he thought. His legs were up, elevated. He couldn’t move his left arm, but it felt warm and far away. 

“Because you were going to die if we left you there,” Cody said, drawing back Obi-Wan’s focus. He had his other hand on Obi-Wan’s stomach, pushing so hard it hurt, more than a little. Pressure, Obi-Wan thought. Pressure to keep his blood inside, where it belonged. He was… sitting in the leg-room in the backseat, wedged in awkwardly.

Obi-Wan closed his eyes and slurred, “Wear your seatbelt.”

Cody made a sound. A laugh. And then he squeezed Obi-Wan’s hand and said, “Hey, no, eyes open, come on.”

Obi-Wan shook his head, just a little, and Cody shouted something at someone, maybe him. But it didn’t make any sense to tell him to drive faster. He couldn’t drive at all. And the dark behind his eyes was so warm and welcoming.

He sank into it, vaguely aware of a squeeze around his hand before he slipped under, completely.


	2. Emergency Room

It was Cody’s first day of leave, he considered, not for the first time, as Rex pulled to a skidding stop in front of the hospital. His first day back home in months, and, sure, they’d ended up at a bar, earlier. They’d had a pretty good time, or at least it had been well air-conditioned and the beer had been cold.

But then there’d been the smoking truck along the side of the road, and the dying man trapped inside, who looked over at Cody and called him  _ dashing _ . Cody hadn’t thought dashing was even a word that real people used.

They’d gone to a bar, and then there’d been the man bleeding out, currently, who would be dead, already, if Rex hadn’t pulled over, if they hadn’t leapt out of the car and gone to see what had happened.

Cody hadn’t expected to find a man inside the truck, and it had kicked his heart into high gear, thrown him back out of the States. There’d been nothing for it but to get him out, grabbing his coat and throwing it over the man, who murmured a bunch of nonsense. Cody got his name out of him, eventually, or at least he thought it was a name.

Obi-Wan was a strange name, but, hell, he’d heard stranger.

Cody wasn’t entirely sure Obi-Wan was still alive as he shoved the door open, in front of the hospital. He scrambled out of his cramped position on the floor. They’d gotten Obi-Wan’s legs elevated, packed the wound on his side as best they could. Cody had covered Obi-Wan with his own coat, trying to keep him warm. Despite everything, he’d stopped responding to Cody a few miles back.

Cody considered that, perhaps, they shouldn’t have moved him, but… He’d been bleeding out; Cody had seen enough men die to know when he was about to lose another. Sometimes, in the moment, there was no time to wait for a medic to reach you. And Rex had said, “I can get us there faster than any ambulance is going to get here.”

And Cody had hefted Obi-Wan into the backseat and said, “Do it, then.” That had been back at the scene of the wreck. That had been before their dying man told him to wear a seatbelt, holding onto Cody’s hand, grip getting weaker by the moment.

But they’d made it to the hospital. He left Rex to head-off the irritated looking law enforcement officers approaching their vehicle, sprinting towards the ER entrance. Flashing red and blue lights had followed them for the last few miles. Probably since Rex blew through that red light, jumped a curve, and drove the wrong way up a one-way street. 

Someone made a sharp, surprised sound as Cody stepped through the automatic doors, into a world well-lit and full of soft music. He said, “I’ve got a guy bleeding out in my car. He needs help.”

For a moment, the nurse behind the closest desk just stared at him, looking like someone had just burst in to ruin her work day. Cody could feel the stranger’s blood drying to his hands and on his shirt. He snapped, in the tone he used mostly on battlefields, far, far away, “ _ Now _ .”

And, suddenly, there was motion everywhere.

#

Doctors and nurses swarmed around Rex’s car. Cody stood to one side while they pulled Obi-Wan out, onto a stretcher, barking orders at one another. There were a half-dozen people clustered around him, as they rushed into the ER again.

Cody stood there, for a long moment, adrenaline still thrumming along in his veins, without a useful purpose. He exhaled. It was cold; his breath steamed in the air, and the blood soaked into his sweater was making him colder. 

He noticed, after a moment, that the doctors had dropped Obi-Wan’s coat to the ground, in their hurry. He bent down and lifted it, balling his hands into the fabric. It was soaked, sodden with blood. He exhaled, frowning at a hard, flat shape within the jacket.

It took him only a moment to fish out a cellphone. He turned it over in his hands, smearing a thumb through the blood on the screen.

“Fucking hell,” Rex said, approaching from one side, scrubbing a hand back over his head. He looked as on-edge as Cody felt, mouth pressed thin, curving down in the corners. “Can you believe this?”

“No,” Cody said, because the last...he glanced down at his watch and scoffed. It hadn’t been even an hour since they first saw the truck on the side of the road. “I can’t.”

Rex shook his head and bumped their shoulders together. He said, “So. You ready to get out of here?” He glanced back at the car. “Help me clean up this mess? You know how hard blood is to get out of shit?”

“Maybe later,” Cody said, gaze still on the ER doors, a hollow ache of worry inside of his chest.

Rex made a short, frustrated sound. He said, “Come on, don’t even think about staying here. It’s our  _ first night  _ back. We don’t even know the guy.”

All true. But they’d saved his life, Obi-Wan, with his impossibly blue eyes and inability to properly react to his situation. Well. They’d  _ tried  _ to save his life. He’d been limp and boneless when the doctors took him away.

“I just want to stay until he’s stable,” Cody said, making to move towards the door again, Rex cursing under his breath.

“They’re not going to tell you anything,” Rex pointed out, following him, anyway.

“Sure they will,” Cody said, and kept going, all the way up to the nurse’s desk. 

#

“I can’t believe you,” Rex said, later, slumped down in one of the uncomfortable chairs in the waiting room, his legs stretched out in front of him and his head tipped back. His eyes were closed. He smelled faintly of booze and the cold. “We could be sleeping right now.”

“No,” Cody corrected, pacing back and forth in front of him, “we couldn’t. I couldn’t.”

He needed to know that Obi-Wan was going to be alright, before he managed anything like rest. For all his complaining, Rex would be the same way. The wondering about how Obi-Wan had fared would only eat away at them, if they tried to leave.

“Well, no, I guess not, what with how worried you are about your  _ fiancé _ ,” Rex grumbled, kicking out at Cody’s ankle as he made another pass, missing. “I can’t believe you told her--”

“Husband would have been harder to prove,” Cody defended, in an undertone, and Rex cracked an eye open to glare at him. 

“I can’t believe she bought it,” he said, but he  _ also  _ kept his tone quiet, only barely audible. 

“I’m very convincing,” Cody said, shrugging. Rex grumbled something that sounded unkind, and Cody added, “You don’t have to stay.”

Rex shut his eye again and heaved a sigh. “No,” he said, crossing his ankles and his arms. “Can’t leave your better half like this, can we?”

#

Hours passed. The sun came up. Cody watched other people come and go. Most of them seemed alright, to him, but he knew his standards were a bit different from the norm. He kept pacing, well past the point of exhaustion, body just moving automatically.

Rex had fallen asleep, head bent at an awkward angle, by the time a doctor came out to talk to them. The woman looked almost as tired as Cody felt, but she said, “We managed to stop the bleeding. He’s….stable.”

Cody felt something release in his chest, all at once. He exhaled, ragged, and said, only half-remembering that he was supposed to be Obi-Wan’s fiancé. “Can I see him?”

The doctor shook her head. “Not yet,” she said. “But...you can come up to his floor. And we could get you some scrubs, if you’d...like to change.” 

#

In the end, Rex decided not to accompany Cody up to the brand new waiting room, at least not right away. He insisted on leaving, showering, and getting new clothes. He promised to return, scrubbing at his face on the way out the door.

Cody headed up the elevator, riding with an elderly couple who kept cutting him sideways glances. He nodded at them, when the elevator reached his floor and went to scout out the waiting room. The chairs looked marginally more comfortable than the ones in the ER.

Cody sighed, nodded, and went to find a bathroom. Scrubbing off in the sink was less than ideal, but he’d gotten clean with less. He dried his forearms and face with paper towels, pulling on the scrubs provided by the doctor.

He looked ridiculous but, on the plus side, he wasn’t covered in blood anymore, except for his pants. He wasn’t ready to give those up. He balled up Obi-Wan’s bloody coat with his dirty sweater, rediscovering the phone. He hadn’t even realized he still  _ had  _ it. That detail had gotten lost, somewhere in the long hours of waiting.

He shrugged and shoved it into his back pocket. And then there was nothing to do but wait, more.

#

There was a coffee machine, in the waiting room. It was big and ugly and made sounds like a dying cow when it dispensed coffee. Cody took the cup and frowned down into it. It was, just like the last two had been, full of grounds.

He swirled the liquid back and forth, took a sip, winced. He was half-way through the cup when the phone in his back pocket started buzzing. He grabbed it automatically - assumed it was Rex - and answered even as he raised it to his ears.

His brain, the part of it still awake, noted the shape was all wrong, but by that point he’d already said, “Hey.”

There was a silence on the other side, for a moment, and then a voice - not Rex, someone Cody didn’t recognize - said, “Uh...hello?”

Cody blinked. He pulled the phone away from his ear and grimaced. Not  _ his  _ phone. Before he could gather his thoughts enough to reply, the guy on the other end of the phone said, “Is, uh, is Obi-Wan there? Nevermind, he must be, but, actually, you know, if he’s still asleep, don’t wake him up. I know he’s--”

“You know Obi-Wan?” Cody cut in, before this guy could tell him anymore about Obi-Wan that he wasn’t supposed to know, technically. He’d already learned that Obi-Wan’s….friends didn’t think it was strange for another man to be answering his phone while Obi-Wan slept. Which was… good to know.

The man on the other end of the line went quiet again, just for a moment. And then he said, “Yeah? Why else would I be--”

“Good,” Cody interrupted, again, pacing over to lean against the nearest wall, tilting his head back against it. “Don’t suppose you know who his next of kin is, then? Because--”

“What?” the man’s voice changed, got sharper. “Who needs to know about--what’s going on? Is he okay?”

Cody grimaced. He knew, belatedly, he could have probably broached this topic better, but it had been a long day and a long night. He’d come out the other side of a night of drinking and directly into a faint hangover without any sleep to ease the transition. And he’d almost watched someone die, only a few hours ago.

He said, exhaling hard, “He’s stable,” and, after the man on the phone got done cursing, “He was in an accident, last night. Hit and run, looked like. But he’s stable now. The doctors want to call family, and--”

“He doesn’t have any,” the man snapped, “fuck, how do you not know that? Who are you, anyway?”

“Cody,” he said, registering that, if this guy knew Obi-Wan the  _ fiancé  _ lie probably wasn’t going to work. “And you are…?”

“Anakin,” the man said, and swore, again, with feeling. “I assume he at least mentioned me? He  _ told  _ me he was going to put me as next of kin in case something happened, he--listen. Where is he? Coruscant General?” Cody made an affirmative sound. “How...how bad is it? Really?” Anakin asked, tone changing to something sharper, worried.

Cody considered carefully. He swallowed and said, “The doctors think he’ll be fine. Eventually.” Anakin swore, but his voice cracked when he did. “Are you going to come down?” Cody asked, because...it would be nice if someone Obi-Wan actually knew was there, when he woke up. And it would let Cody go home. Get some sleep. Reassured that someone else was there to look after things. 

“Fuck, I’m not even in town,” Anakin said, his voice cracking, “I, my wife. She just had twins. We’re with her family. I don’t-- _ fuck _ . I’ll have to - to get a plane. I don’t know how long…” he trailed off, swearing viciously.

And Cody stood there, frowning at his half-empty coffee cup, the grounds in the bottom, and said, “I’ll be staying with him until you get here.”

“Alright,” Anakin said, after another long moment. He sounded distracted. “That’s--thanks, man. I’m glad someone will be.” He sighed, over the line, and said, “Sorry we’re gonna end up meeting like this.” And the phone went quiet against Cody’s ear, disconnected.

He swallowed, tossed aside the half-drank coffee, and considered that there’d likely been a lot of assumptions made in that conversation, none of which he’d bothered to correct. He scrubbed at his face, and hoped Rex came back with real clothes before too much longer.

#

Rex brought clothes  _ and  _ food, when he came back, which redeemed the amount of time he’d been gone. Cody ate mechanically, without tasting a single bite, but that was more a reflection on the way he’d gotten used to eating than anything else.

Rex also brought hot coffee that wasn’t full of grounds, and Cody slung an arm around him, squeezing him for a long moment. “So,” Rex said, as they balled up their trash, “how’s the love of your life doing?”

Cody shot him a dark look; Rex grinned at him, unrepentant. “No word, yet,” Cody said, “but I did get ahold of a friend of his. He’s flying in.”

Rex nodded, leaned back, and asked, “His  _ actual  _ fiancé?”

Cody shoved the side of his head and they sat there in silence, waiting.

#

Cody thought, vaguely, that Anakin - whoever he was - would be there before Obi-Wan actually woke up. Instead, they got shuffled up to a different floor and Rex went home to sleep. Cody put his head against the wall and fell asleep there, with his legs crossed.

He’d slept in far worse places, truth be told.

At least no one was trying to shoot at him in the hospital. He woke up, shot Rex a text asking for a toothbrush, and saw that Anakin still hadn’t found a flight. He was staring, blankly, up at the game show playing on the waiting room television, when a doctor came to find him.

“He’s not awake yet,” the man said, smiling, far too chipper for Cody’s current frame of mind, “but you can go in and sit, if you like. It’s more comfortable. And private. And it’ll probably be easier for him, if someone he cares about is in there when he wakes up.”

And Cody, really, could have corrected the confusion he’d created, right then. But he didn’t. He gathered his stuff, instead, and followed the doctor over to a private room, with a window overlooking the parking lot, and a curtain drawn back from the single bed. 

Obi-Wan looked smaller, lying in the hospital bed. But they didn’t have him hooked up to oxygen, and Cody knew that to be a good sign. He had I.V.s in his arm, but they’d stopped pumping him full of blood - also a good sign. The blankets were tucked in around him. 

Cody nodded along with the instructions he received about how to contact a nurse and how to work the television and everything else. And then he walked over to the chair in the room, sat down, and stared at the man he’d saved...however long ago it had been.

He was pale; probably partially because of the blood loss. There were freckles across his nose. His hair, lank, currently, was reddish. There were the lumpy shapes of bandages under the blankets, a cast around his left leg. Cody exhaled, and said, “Well,” and couldn’t think of anything else to say.

#

Cody had seen a lot of dead men and a lot of injured men. He was fairly confident Obi-Wan would be out for days, after the trauma he’d gone through. It didn’t even make sense, at first, when the man started stirring around on his bed.

Cody stared at him, blankly, and was still staring when Obi-Wan turned his head on the pillow and blinked over at him. A little furrow formed between Obi-Wan’s brows. His eyes weren’t...quite focused, but that didn’t stop him from slurring, a moment later, “Cody, wasn’t it?”

“You remember,” Cody said, which was, he considered, not the most impressive rejoiner he could have managed. It was half a surprise, though. Trauma screwed with the memory. He knew that. Cody leaned forward, reaching for the remote to call the nurse. 

Obi-Wan nodded, just a little, and hissed at the motion. “Yes,” he said. “You, ah, found me.” He blinked, gaze sliding sideways as Cody hit the call button. “Hospital?” he asked.

“Yeah, you’re alright now,” Cody said, putting the remote down again. He’d promised Anakin he’d stay with Obi-Wan, but… well. His deception wasn’t likely to stand with Obi-Wan conscious to tell people they’d never met before the accident.

“Good,” Obi-Wan said, and shut his eyes. For a beat, Cody thought he was going back to sleep. Then he blinked again, frowning as he looked back at Cody. “Why’re...you here?”

It was the question Cody had been waiting on. He shifted his weight, and, hell, he’d faced worse situations than some social awkwardness. Far worse. He shrugged. “You were hurt bad. I didn’t want you to...wake up alone.”

Obi-Wan blinked. His eyes were much bluer in the daylight. Distractingly blue. He said, drily, “And they let you stay?”

Cody grimaced, just a little. The nurse was going to be there, any second. “They may think we’re getting married,” he said.

Obi-Wan made a ragged little sound. It took Cody a moment to identify it as a laugh, turning into a soft cough. He said, after a moment, lifting his left arm, just a little, “Do they? Where’s my ring, then?”

And, fuck, but he curled his mouth into a little smile, looking amused, and Cody knew he was exhausted, knew he wasn’t in anything like a stable frame of mind. None of that stopped the kick in his chest when he said, to this man who had called him dashing while bleeding out all over him, “I was going to take you to pick it out, remember?”

“Thoughtful,” Obi-Wan murmured. “Perhaps we can put if off until after I’m out of here?” And the nurse was in the room, then, and Cody waited to be forcibly removed. 

Instead, the nurse glanced over at him and leaned closer to Obi-Wan, saying, with a feigned conspiratorial tone, “He’s been here the whole time, you know. Since he brought you in. I thought we were going to have to admit him, if you didn’t wake up soon. You’re very lucky.”

“Oh,” Obi-Wan said, glancing at Cody, a gleam in his eyes that Cody didn’t recognize, but that he’d  _ like to _ , and said, “I know.” And he lifted his right, uninjured hand off the mattress, just a little, fingers extended out and--

Well, there was nothing else for it, really, but to take the invitation. Cody took his hand, gently, and waited to see what the hell was going to happen next.


End file.
